Dynamic drivers vs Planars ( Hifiman) Differences?

I ordered some Focal Clear OG to upgrade from my 1990 ( I use them EQed) and was wondering how good quality planars compare. I love my Beyer 1990s with EQ. Great weight to the sound , fast attack and a great soundstage.
I did recently try the HD490pro and found them to be a touch slow and not as much impact. But what I didn’t like the most was the constricted soundstage. Like everything was bundled into a ball, and in my head. Whereas the 1990 project a bit outwards and have great instrument separation.

so I was curious about Planars.

Something like the Arya stealth or Organic.

I’m hesitant to get planars because I have read that they don’t offer the same amount of slam and dynamics that dynamic driver headphones offer.

To those who own both, any thoughts?

I am intrigued with how fast planars are. But that might make them sound dry if they don’t trail a bit more naturally like dynamic drivers do. I tried the XS a long time ago and found them to be zingy sounding and no slam.

I EQ all my headphones btw.

Thanks !

 

It's about flavor. Planars' low frequency sounds are quite differently sounded due to the characters of a planar driver. To me, some planars' slam is enough and to me it sounds fast and fierce enough. Most Hifiman's planars are well-known soft sounded, so if you might need to search and analyze the FR of headphones that you like, etc, or the amp pair. Audeze's headphones, Final's and Abyss's are well-known with good slams. There are too many elements you need to figure out though. Even not every dynamic driver is with good slam.

 

Have had some chats about this over the years and while I certainly haven't had the opportunity to hear any planar headphone out of an amp with the might of Mjolnir behind it (not the Schiit thing per se but the mythological Hammer of God capable of bonking a world-sized serpent over the head), it seems to me like that sense of reservation is more or less a constant.

Someone on Head-fi once described the Klipsch HP-3 as having planar-like bass characteristics, and the wild thing is I don't entirely disagree. It's got pretty fast bass, but while it hits hard you get this weird sense that it's not *fully* leaning into its punches like a lot of planars do. Compare that to something like the HD600 which, despite maybe not being as heavily-built a person in this analogy, the Senn exhibits good form and puts their full weight into each punch.

Something like the Focal Utopia's just Muhammad Ali in his prime.

Then there's the matter of staging. I know this is likely an upstream issue as much as anything else but I just don't hear planars as doing headstage nearly as well as dynamics. There's often much more distance between the listener and whatever else goes on "on-stage" with planar designs, but if judging how cleanly-delineated individual sonic elements are, planars just come off as more diffuse and indistinct vis-a-vis dynamic headphones.

I'm running with the theory that it's to do with how larger-diaphragm drivers seem to present much larger waveforms to the ears whereas dynamic drivers often have worse dispersion, so everything is more immediately directed "ahead" of the driver, more rolloff around the edges so things seem a bit more directional. Sort of like how less forgiving of placement waveguides allow for crisper imaging? Of course I could be fully talking out of my butt there, but I do think that the whole premise of orthos presenting a planar wavefront is just poorly-adapted to headphone use, at least WRT imaging; dynamics do have an edge overall in terms of delineation IME and (though this'll vary with preference), how it presents a headstage.

There's also stuff about how, because planars have so much surface area to be controlled, you end up covering the whole thing in metal traces cuz duh, magnets are pretty ineffective against plastic. @purr1n mentioned thinking that the fact that so much of a planar headphone's surface is covered by metal contributes to the perception of hashy treble that folks hear on planar designs. I remember Marv also went on about how he felt that the relatively large surface area of orthodynamic headphones had a tendency to "absorb" microdetail which is why a lot of the less superlative TOTL planars all have an overly smooth, plasticky presentation that harkens to how Samsung phones smoosh out fine detail with their camera app settings.

Just for the record there ARE advantages to planars/orthos and it's fully valid to like one style of presentation over the other. I've got a vintage YH100 modded by dBel that I adore (other than my ears aching if I wear them for more than ~40 minutes), though vintage planars seem only tangentially related to modern ones in terms of how they sound; it's the modern HiFiMAN style of sound that approximates electrostatics that I dislike.

I've only ever tried the ESP950 as well as some of the cheaper rectangular Stax rigs in store demos over the years, but from what I've heard I figure that it's just not my style.

 

Thanks to both of your replies!

Yeah I think it’s best to be on the ‘ safe side’ and listen to some planars in a shop, before purchasing.
I’ve heard Audeze have more slam and impact to them compared to other planars.

I did order a Focal Clear OG, which should be here by the end of this week to see if it beats out my 1990. EQed as always.

I never understood why people spend so much on different headphones with diff tunings instead of getting a technically great headphone and EQing it.
To each their own.

 

Planar headphones sound so varied from one to the other, I think it's not helpful to group them together and make a blanket statement that is a generalization and not accurate.

 

I agree and that is why I ended up with the HFM Susvara (OG) after going through many dynamic and electrostatic systems, I think they are the most technically complete and well rounded headphone right now in the market. Their timbre is also on the natural side with minimum peaks and dips in the frequency range.

They are not perfect of course, I think the impact / slam is on the weak side but in my experience it's easier to cover up this kind of weakness with proper amp / source matching rather than if the headphone by itself has weird peaks, dips or resonance like the Abyss AB1266 for example with a hole in their midrange.

 

• Not every headphone takes EQ well and some are resistant by nature due to cup reflections/harmonics/etc.
• EQ can introduce undesirable artifacts like phasing or ringing.
• EQ introduces fuckery in the form of an app or additional hardware.
• EQ can create nervosa because humans hate making choices and hate lots of choices even more.

 

why I said that get a technically competent headphone to apply EQ to.
With a headphone with great technicalities , EQ will make it wonderful and not have all those issues you mention.

 

That's not an accurate statement.

The performance of the headphone has no bearing on EQ artifacts, (ie. phasing for standard EQ or latency for linear phase)

Some headphones take EQ well, and technicals aren't the determining factor. It comes down to the physical and sonic characteristics. Some cheap planars take EQ well

EQ can ruin technical performance. The poster child for this is the HD800, the physical tuning is so sensitive that pretty much any EQ wrecks the staging. Same generally if you change the stock pads to different material/thickness.

Finally, EQ often gives infinite adjustment options, which can be nervosa inducing for folks who keep trying to even out every gap in the FR. You can start to blot out the original designer tuning of the headphone and it's not hard to get very far from the shoreline of sanity.

My ears still burn from the memory of someone running two Pultecs and software EQ for their Utopias. Without constraint, you risk becoming the kid at McDonalds mixing every soda together until you get brown. The Schiit Loki / Lokius equalizers have the benefit of only having a few knobs, so you can't go too nuts

 

Minor contribution to the thread but I don't agree with the take that dynamics have better slam. Over time I'm coming around to thinking my 650s have pretty flabby overshooting bass that is also concentrated right at the ear canal due to the small driver, enough to cause headaches with modern bass levels in music. The subbass extension thing reviewers focus on is honestly a far 3rd in terms of importance to me. If I were to rank bass quality factors it should be size>grip>>>>subbass extension.

My personal theory on this is planars are anti-excursion and pro-size i.e. use a big taut membrane to move back and forth as little as possible and maintain low distortion/tight grip right in the middle of that driver gap between two magnet arrays. Planars have distortion numbers in the bass no dynamic will even dream of. Focals might seem low distortion at low volumes but when it clips it blows out entirely like @purr1n tested. But any big membrane has membrane breakup even if you drive it with a bunch of magnets, just a different kind of breakup than the usual dome breakup. It might explain the "ortho wall" phenomenon of orthos and why their treble never seems entirely right at least with the common bar magnet taut membrane designs. Not that I think Utopias have more enjoyable treble but with planars it seems like an ever present haze while Utopias ring cleanly and high up which doesn't clog up resolution as much to me (but is honestly more offputting than most planar haze). Oh also magnet array interference.

Most planar companies seem to pursue resolving treble issues with planars while Hifiman is out there going for as taut and thin membrane as possible to really hone in on that bass stability and transients and just ignore the many people complaining about their very weird treble. I get that many don't like that bass presentation but I see others who consider that sort of low-slam, see-through, hyper-taut, and large-scale bass to be reference. You can always get a big amp like Mjolnir 3 or Holo Bliss and use NOS DACs to juice them up while shutting out the treble. Does Hifiman and Holo Audio have a customer base overlap perhaps?

That also translates to headstage. I'll just use depth and scale relative to the driver to be clear. Scale is how large the soundstage seems and how "all around you" it seems, and depth is how far away/out of your head the objects seem. Got an AI-made illustration here:


Planars do very well for scale. Very easy to hear how enveloping things are in a recording with planars, moreso than dynamics IME. But the planars I've tried so far just squeeze things right up against your ear while HD650s given the right gear and recording can portray tangible depth in front and behind the driver, likely what you meant by imaging. But a lot of people prefer planar headstage likely because without speaker-like angling e.g. SR1A and HD800, more driver depth just makes the soundstage a bit weird since depth relative to the driver translates to overly wide headstage.

One last thing is that the YH-100 and D8000 and those orthodynamics with the concentric ring magnets...maybe shouldn't be grouped with other planars (I know planar is an umbrella term but the market is mostly bar magnets and taut membrane). @ChaChaRealSmooth seemed to like the D8000; Chrono from headphones.com thought they were dynamic before seeing the spec sheet; @purr1n liked the timbre. Concentric ring magnets and surround-like corrugation make them kind of a planar/dynamic hybrid no? The D8000's CSD and distortion measurements look more like a dynamic driver's than a planar's, and it's not even that large in area like a bar magnet planar. Expensive as hell though and I have zero listening experience with one.

 

Most Mid-Fi or some of the Hi-end planars are truly well-known of weird treble but these years I feel that more and more Planar headphones companies realized the problems. D8000pro is a good example like you said and Caldera is good with that too. And some Hifiman's headphones are better and better now in that area. I think it might be that planars are still too young, compared with dynamics or electrostatics, and electrostatics well-known have weird slam.

And to add another point of view to the thread if you need to listen to some music with tons of instruments, the planars' advantages are giant-killer. With it, you only need to conquer the rest of the parts that your planars are weak at. And nowadays high-end planars are less and less with disadvantages now.

 

I might attribute this to the low distortion and FR and etc, cuz many planars share the similar FR and harmony distortion and even ortho wall (sounds characters etc), while dynamic are more varied, compared with planars. For example some planars with higher and varied distortion with very different FR I feel they are different with others.

 

You mean like the HD800?

 

In my humble opinion, I'm not saying that there is a fact or now we have all the data that can show the reason of it, but I just want to say some data we have might show something are apparent right now. One note of sound of one instrument consists of different frequencies. If we set the replay into one's ear (HRTF and etc) with one FR without distortions of this A, and first planar Harmony distortions X1, Y1, Z1, etc, and its delay or else elements we have known D1 and we don't yet know U, So the sound of one person will hear Sound1=A+(X1+Y1+Z1...)+D1+U1. Then if we set next planar's, we get Sound2=A+(X2+Y2+Z2...)+D2+U2. If the X1 are similar to X2, and Y1 to Y2 and etc, but not U1 or U2. I think two headphones would be sounded more similar.(Low distortion maybe I would explain that 0.001 are similar to 0.002, but 0.1 are less similar to 0.2. If we put A=100, then if XYZ are less influential the A part would not change too much, Like number 100.001 against 100.1.) However in U part, there are some elements we have not got yet or known yet, and that's why I have not said those things but just said with what I've experienced and the datas we already got, I feel the similar FR and HD and etc might be the reason that you feel they are same, but of course it might not be the reason and I'm not that familiar that your opinion or experience, so I might misunderstood your point.

This part might just be the we not-yet-known part (U part), which I missed what you meant before.

 

You say that as if ChaCha doesn't hate the HD800 and only tolerates the version with Jupiter's mods, which seem to save it. Also, frankly you're cherry picking an outlier because most dynamic drivers don't run ring designs.

Again, prefacing this next statement with a caveat that I've never heard a TOTL planar rig or owned any gear that's particularly flattering to planars: I don't hear the HD800 as being inferiror with respect to textures or microdynamics (I still hesitate to use the word "plankton" cuz that's more a nebulous feeling than something I can pinpoint)

 

I think we entirely agree here.

One thing that's a bit messed up about headstage is when someone tells me width and depth I literally can't tell what dimension they're talking about. Headphone drivers are almost 90 degrees off from speakers. Width to your head is depth to the driver. Depth to your head is width to the driver. So for me planars do that big wide driver thing well but you can't really hear "beyond" the membrane much.

The thing about homogenizing...To me planars sound like they just focus on unloading the macro dynamics of a song on your ears in ways dynamic drivers (ironic) struggle to. Super agile and fast in that sense. But the edge and timbre are quite sandblasted away by haze and I hear that too. It's not something entirely bad because I think most people's chains are very grainy in the first place with their measubating DS dacs and measubating high feedback opamps so flat membrane headphones do sort of damp that.

Dynamics seem to scale well with purist non-measurbating gear but I think having to push for expensive gear chains to unlock the resolve of dynamics is cumbersome. I got lucky to know SBAF to find crazy esoteric bargains like SW51+ but SET is a leap of faith that most people wouldn't go for.